


low hanging fruit of the poisonous tree

by throughadoor



Category: Good Wife (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughadoor/pseuds/throughadoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The easily acquired gains from evidence gathered with the assistance of illegally obtained information must be excluded from trial." About last night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	low hanging fruit of the poisonous tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ramentaceous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ramentaceous/gifts).



> Pro tip: don't offer to write in a fandom that is generating new weekly canon up until six days before the Yuletide deadline! This story is canonical by the skin of its teeth through the most recently aired episode ("Nine Hours") but could probably be set any time after "Poisoned Pill."

KALINDA WOKE UP half-dead. Her brain wrapped in barbed wire, her stomach a swimming pool of hydrochloric acid, body curled up on a coroner's slab, feet stashed in an ice bucket. The worst part was she couldn't stay dead. Against her better judgment, Kalinda opened her eyes.

Once awake, she catalogued the facts: she was hung over, and lying in an unfamiliar bed on a concrete mattress, and someone else's freezing cold foot was touching the sole of her foot. Kalinda turned over, and the swimming pool of hydrochloric acid sloshed. The cold foot rubbed against her foot like a dead fish.

So, that happened. This was the first coherent thought that squeezed through the barbed wire fence scraping against the inside of Kalinda's skull. The second thought was that it was time to get out of there.

Skirt, blouse, boots, jacket. She was not fleeing the scene of the crime. Phone, purse, door. For one thing, it was Kalinda's job was to race to crime scenes, not flee from them.

The side pocket of Kalinda's purse was where she kept things that fixed mistakes. There was a dose of Plan B, a Canadian mail-order bottle of Tylenol with codeine, a 9 mm semi-automatic, a package of disposable latex gloves and Leela Patal's Indiana driver's license. In the grand scheme of things, last night had been a little mistake, and would only require the application of Tylenol. If that didn't work, then later, maybe the gun.

Walking out into the sunlit parking lot, she squinted like a mole and fumbled for her keys. Her phone beeped, and the noise triggered a small earthquake in the back of her skull. The incoming text message eliminated any possibility of stopping at her apartment to change clothes. Kalinda had twenty minutes to find parking on California Ave and she was wearing yesterday's blouse.

There was a Glock in her glove compartment, and unlike the 9 mm in her purse, it was registered with Kalinda's FOID number. The 9 mm wasn't _un_ registered, because running around with an unregistered weapon was amateur hour. But a database search would report that the 9 mm belonged to a John Alexander Berry, who renewed his FOID number in 2006, died of congestive heart failure in 2007 and was licensed to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Illinois until the end of 2011. Had to love Chicago. John Alexander Berry probably voted Obama in the 2008 election.

So, this was the thing: getting caught wearing yesterday's blouse was like fingerprints on an unregistered gun. The blouse was purple, but made of that synthetic silky stuff that didn't wrinkle. She would swap her jacket for the one in the back seat. It would have to do.

 

"SO, WHAT DO you have for me?"

"Good morning, Kalinda, nice to see you." He was trying to sound entirely sarcastic, but failing. "You're right, we _should_ get a drink sometime, and then we can really catch up. I'm fine, thanks, sprained my ankle playing football with my nephews Thanksgiving weekend. What about you, you don't look so good, are you coming down with something?"

This day was going to require bigger sunglasses. "Good morning, Carey," she said. "What do you have for me?"

They were standing in line at the coffee cart outside the courthouse. Carey craned his neck so he could smirk at her over his shoulder. He didn't see the line move forward and she had to make a sweep of her hand at him before he noticed he was backing up traffic. "You never change," he said. "It's kind of reassuring."

"Yeah, I'm like death and taxes." She made her hands into fists inside the pockets of her jacket. "Now do you have something for me or can I go get a coffee somewhere that isn't recycling last Thursday's filter?"

"Okay, okay," Carey said, raising his hands in surrender. "Have it your way."

Kalinda raised an eyebrow. Having it her way was the default assumption of every interaction that had or would ever occur between her and Carey Agos.

"Lockhart/Gardner took the Crawford case."

"Lockhart/Gardner takes a lot of cases."

"Lucy Crawford made a criminal complaint before the civil suit."

If she hadn't been well acquainted his eager puppy impersonation, she'd be insulted right now. Obviously she knew about the aborted criminal complaint, she wasn't trying to do her job with brain damage.

"We're aware," she said, taking another casual step forward in line. "Your office declined to prosecute. Didn't think there was sufficient evidence, you were afraid to go after the hotel chain whose bed taxes pay your salaries." She shrugged. "I know how it is."

Carey frowned. Eager puppies didn't like it when you wouldn't play fetch. "The Civil Rights Task Force spent two months on Lucy Crawford and the Congress Plaza," he said.

"They spent two months on the case, didn't bring charges, and you think they have something I don't?" she said, eyes wide in an intentionally bad impression of incredulousness.

"Does the name Ryan Hollahan mean anything to you?"

She blamed it on the pre-coffee hangover headache, but it made her head throb to let Carey see he'd hit pay dirt.

He laughed, her sour face enough to keep him talking. "There're four boxes of files sitting in Barkley's office," Carey said. "They were all set to go forward, but the DP came straight from Childs. Barkley's pissed, right? All that work for nothing."

Kevin Barkley was in charge of the Civil Rights Task Force, but he'd been recruited for the job out of the Manhattan DA's office less than a year ago, so Kalinda had no traction with him. The task force ASAs were Michael Vielle and Elizabeth Francis. Vielle hated her, but Liz owed her a favor from the--

"--can't exactly give you the key to Barkley's office, but--"

Oh, Carey was still talking. "Yeah," Kalinda said. "I think I can take it from here."

Before he could object, Carey reached the front of the line. "Large, black, two sugars, please," he said.

Kalinda snaked up behind him. "Make that two, would you?" she said, pushing cash across the counter. "My treat."

"You shouldn't have," Carey sneered. They stepped away from the cart with their sugary coffee-flavored water. She raised her cup at him and mimed a toast. "Look, now we got to have that drink," she said. "See you later, Carey."

"Kalinda, wait," Carey called after her. She turned on her heel, but didn't take a step back toward him. Carey was smart enough to text her and suggest they find themselves standing in line for coffee at the same time, but not smart enough to realize they couldn't dick around with their heads together on the steps of the Cook County District Court.

"The state's attorney's office. You were there for two years and you left."

Kalinda cocked her head. "You can say 'fired,'" she said. "I know I'm the cautionary tale of legend."

Carey laughed, but not in a mean way, because he really was a golden retriever dressed up in a wool camel coat. "C'mon," he said. "I know you. You can't expect me to believe you would've let yourself get caught doing something that would get you fired unless you were ready to quit anyway."

This was an oddly sweet thing for him to say. It made Kalinda's stomach feel strange, or maybe that was the courthouse cart coffee swirling in the swimming pool of hydrochloric acid.

"Gotta go," she said. "Crawford evidentiary hearing is at three."

"Yeah, I know," Carey said. "That's why I called last night. I tried to call you and I actually even tried to call Alicia. But your phone was off. Since when does Kalinda Sharma ever turn off her phone?"

Right. That happened. "Going now," Kalinda said. She raised her coffee cup in mock salute. "I know you," she said. "You can't expect me to believe you _want_ to be talked out of the noble contribution of public service."

 

KALINDA'S FIRST JOB as an investigator had been working for Janek Cermak. The office was on West 59th Street, two rooms above a takeout chicken place. She had tailed cheating wives and tracked down deadbeat dads. He'd spent a lot of time sitting behind his desk, getting sticky sauerkraut stains on his shirt. What little work he'd done had been digging up dirt for the Calabrese brothers.

When Kalinda met Murphy, he'd just made detective, and it showed. She'd had to walk from the office through Washington Park three nights in a row before it'd been safe to slow up and let him know that she knew that he was tailing her.

"You'll be immune from any prosecution," he'd said.

"Yeah, but I'll be out of a job." She'd crossed her arms, one hand resting on her purse.

"You'll be out of a job pretty soon either way," Murphy had said, stretching his arms in that way cops did when they wanted to let you know they were feeling the weight of their shoulder holster. "If you cooperate with the prosecutor," he'd said, "your severance check from Cermak won't come with cement galoshes."

And she'd almost been scared, for a second, but then Murphy had said, "cement galoshes," for serious, _cement galoshes_. And she'd smiled real slow and told him, "Find me a new _job_ , then we'll talk."

When Kalinda started working at the state's attorney's office, her expectations had been:

1) a job  
2) a job where the performance evaluation wouldn't involve getting shot in the back of the head.

When Carey took a job as an ASA, it was plate-glass transparent he wanted a job that would:

1) compensate for the embarrassment of being let go from Lockhart/Gardner  
2) negate the major embarrassment of losing the contest with Alicia  
3) somehow make up for its own _massive_ embarrassment of a salary cut.

So he might have had some unrealistic expectations about the cost of moral clarity.

 

LIZ FRANCIS SAID, "I thought you were a retired do-gooder," when Kalinda was still in the car and, "that favor had an expiration date, you know," when Kalinda was walking up to the office and, "fuck you, sweetheart," when Kalinda nudged the lobby's revolving door with a push of her hip and, finally, "okay, okay, where do you want me to send the fax?" when Kalinda stepped into the elevator. She gave Liz the number of the fax machine in Alicia's office.

There was somebody in Alicia's office, but it was not Alicia.

"Mr. Gold."

"Ms. Sharma, always a pleasure."

"Alicia's not in yet..." Kalinda trailed off, creating the wiggle room for this to sound like either a statement or a question. When he didn't jump, she added, "I think she had to stop by the courthouse. You could let Courtney know you were here?"

She had no idea if Alicia was at the courthouse, but it sounded plausible.

"Actually," Gold said, swiveling around in Alicia's chair, "I was hoping we could talk."

Kalinda had a pre-programmed blank stare for conversations that started like this.

"About what happened last night," Gold said. "I'd love to get your phone number."

"Mr. Gold," Kalinda said, circling around to perch on the desk by the fax machine, "I think you've got the wrong idea about me. I'm not the political type. I'm not even sure who my alderman is."

That was not entirely true: Kalinda's address put her on the edge of Ward 27. Her alderwoman was Susan Greaves. She was third term and had obviously gotten elected trading on her husband's name because her father-in-law was a back-up point guard for the Bulls in the seventies. But Kalinda really wasn't the political type.

"Fair enough," he said, steepling his fingers. "But, see, last night, I needed to reach Mrs. Florrick. I spoke with Courtney here at the office, I spoke with young Zach, I spoke with the other Mrs. Florrick. And Courtney and Zach and Jackie all said the same thing. 'She's with Kalinda,' they said."

"Hmm?"

"A political campaign is a lot like a college dormitory," Gold said, leaning forward. "No sleep, bad pizza, eventually everybody sees everyone else in their underwear."

"Hmm."

"If you and Alicia have a, you know, a Mount Holyoke thing," Gold said, "I don't want to know. But if I'm in the business of needing to know where Mrs. Florrick is, and you're in the business of knowing where she is, well, I don't see why we can't do some business together."

Kalinda tapped her fingers on the fax machine's display, willing Liz Francis to bail her out of his conversation. "I'm in the business of knowing a lot of things, Mr. Gold," she said. "For example, I _think_ I know Alicia went to Sarah Lawrence for undergrad, not Mount Holyoke."

"Right. Of course," Gold said, looking unimpressed. Alicia had always seemed pained by the idea of Gold and Kalinda in the same room, and now Kalinda could see why. He might know a few ways to non-verbally communicate "eat shit and die" Kalinda hadn't picked up yet. Not that she was going to admit it.

"So if I see Alicia," Kalinda said, sliding off the desk, "I'll let her know you were looking for her, about--?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter now. I wanted her at the AFL-CIO thing last night. But, in the future--"

"What AFL-CIO thing?"

"The AFL-CIO endorsed Peter's campaign."

"The hotel service workers?"

"AFL-CIO is the largest coalition of unionized workers in Cook County, actually."

"Right. Congratulations." Kalinda pulled out her phone and made another "hmm" when Gold said "take my card" and "we'll talk again soon" and then he was gone, so whatever. The video was on the Sun-Times website.

"I have always championed the rights of union workers," said the grainy image of Peter that filled Kalinda's phone screen. "I am honored to accept the endorsement of the AFL-CIO and I am proud to stand before you, to stand with you, especially today. I make a pledge to you now -- no member of my campaign, no member of my family will cross this picket line."

The shot panned out. Even on a cell phone screen, Kalinda could see he was standing in front of the Congress Plaza Hotel.

Peter had made a pass at Kalinda once -- of course he had -- right after she'd started working for him. But he'd been clumsy and ham-handed about it, back at the office after a little too much to drink at a fundraiser. She'd given him a blank stare, and he'd apologized quick and backed off quicker.

Childs never put the moves on her, but she'd worked at the office a year before he could tell her apart from the secretaries and stopped asking her to send faxes and fetch coffee. He'd only bothered to learn her name when he wanted someone he could set up to take the fall for his bimbo eruptions witch hunt.

So that was the Kalinda Sharma endorsement of Peter Florrick's campaign for Cook County State's Attorney.

 

KALINDA DUCKED INTO the ladies room, wanting to smooth her hair and do emergency first aid on yesterday's eye make up. However, Diane was standing at the sink washing her hands.

"Slumming down here?" Kalinda asked, in a tone that aimed for light with the accuracy of Diane at a shooting range.

Diane's laugh was brittle. "Better get used to it," she said. "Derrick is obsessed with how much square footage is being wasted on private washrooms for the corner offices. I'm sure that'll be the next thing to get peer-reviewed into oblivion."

Kalinda watched Diane lean forward to reapply her lipstick. She used a tube of greasy Max Factor in a terra cotta shade that made her skin look like cantaloupe flesh. Diane wore makeup in colors that announced she _still_ resented having to wear makeup to be taken seriously as a woman professional.

"I hear about the Lucy Crawford case," Diane said, turning to Kalinda. "She thought she was being harassed by someone in management because she's a lesbian and she's a union member, but now it looks like she was being harassed by the union rep?"

"Looks like it," Kalinda said.

"I can't believe we're not beyond this kind of thing." Diane pursed her lips at the mirror. "When I was first working," she said, "women still had to be a certain way."

What Diane meant was that even a radical civil rights attorney like Jonas Stern only brought a female lawyer with him when he'd started his own firm because he and said female lawyer had been having an affair. A while back, doing oppo when the firm was considering a reproductive health care coverage class action against a private insurance company, Kalinda had discovered that Diane got an abortion six months after they'd opened the doors at Stern/Lockhart. They hadn't taken the class action.

"It's just not too much to ask," Diane was saying. "To be able to be who you are."

Kalinda unclipped the twist of her hair and felt the awkward. Diane was trying to have a moment with her about ... something.

"Hollahan, the union rep, he works in the hotel's catering kitchen," Kalinda said. "Lucy Crawford works in reservations. So we still need to prove access."

The first year Kalinda worked at Lockhart/Gardner, she'd heard two things over and over again: there was a lifetime ban on tequila at the office Christmas party and there was a rumor Diane was a secret lesbian. If it hadn't been for the former, Kalinda might have shared her opinion on the latter: if Diane was a secret lesbian, it was because it was a secret Diane was keeping from herself.

"Alicia went back to the Congress Plaza last night," Diane said. "That duplicated room key you encrypted worked perfectly. She can prove that Hollahan had access, but now we need to firm up his motive."

"I might have something coming in on him," Kalinda said, hoping Liz Francis didn't make a liar out of her. "Meeting minutes from an AFL-CIO closed executive session. Hollahan complained to the board, said he was losing control of the Congress Plaza employees because some of them were threatening to bolt if domestic partner benefits didn't make it into the negotiation with the hotel."

"Hollahan's willing to strike over the benefits package," Diane said. "But heaven forbid that every card-carrying union member actually have equal rights. That's outrageous."

The third year Kalinda worked at Lockhart/Gardner, she'd finally found the bottle of Jose Cuervo the paralegals hid in the mailroom, and she'd kept any evolving opinions on Diane Lockhart's secret lesbianism to herself.

Also, Kalinda didn't really give a shit. She was glad Ryan Hollahan was going to get nailed for trashing Lucy Crawford's office, but she also thought if a person wanted health insurance benefits, they should find a job that paid for them, not expect to rely on someone else. Either way, Kalinda was not going to tolerate a big moment of sisterhood with Diane Lockhart in the ladies room.

Diane twisted the cap of her lipstick. "So--" she started.

"So, I'll keep you posted," Kalinda said. She refastened her hair clip, nodded at Diane's reflection and slid out the door.

Coming around the corner was Blake, and his eyes jumped out of his head like a cartoon character when he saw her.

"Heeeeeey, about last night--" he started to say. She gave him brief consideration. Finding out what Blake thought he knew might be useful, but Kalinda did not have time for Blake today.

"Busy now," Kalinda said without breaking stride. "Come find me in the sandbox tomorrow."

"Careful," Blake called after her. "Know you took a tumble in the sandbox last night."

The thing with Blake was a concern, but not a major one. Blake's thing actually didn't have anything to do with Kalinda. Sure, he was riffling through her private life like it was a dentist's office issue of _People_ magazine, and that made her want to cut off his balls, gouge out his eyes and then kill him. But it didn't have anything to do with her _personally_.

Blake was trying to take her down because that was what predators did in the wild. If Blake was a tiger, her concern was to make sure he knew she was a big game hunter with a double-barreled rifle, not an antelope.

Anyway, he was lousy at holding down his spot in the food chain. Digging up Donna was low-hanging fruit. The thing with her (and the thing with Lana before that, and the other thing after) was just proof that having a narrow bandwidth for what made a person tolerable meant that Kalinda couldn't bother to be picky about blond or brunette, boy or girl, whatever. And Kalinda did not have sex when it was intolerable. Sleeping with creeps for information was something lazy people did, like taking the L one stop when they could just walk.

In conclusion: Blake was a pretty fucking lazy tiger.

 

"HAVE YOU SEEN Alicia?" Kalinda asked Courtney.

Courtney shook her head. "Look, about last night," she said, ducking their heads together.

Oh, for fuck's sake. "Don't worry about it," Kalinda said.

Courtney's eyes widened. "So you know what happened?" she said. "The room-booking transaction history from the Congress Plaza finally showed up." She held up a courier's envelope and a stack of paper that looked like it had been spit out from an old dot-matrix printer. "And it's current, uh, it's current through this morning, actually."

She handed Kalinda the printout, and at the very top was the guest name "GARDNER, WILLIAM D" with a checkout time of 7:46 this morning and a check-in time of 11:59 last night.

Kalinda tried to steer the conversation back on track. "Have you seen Alicia?" she asked again.

Courtney fidgeted with the top button of her cardigan. "So she hasn't been with you?" Kalinda could tell that Courtney was trying to pitch that one as maybe-a-statement, maybe-a-question but Kalinda didn't swing outside of the zone.

She considered Courtney for a moment, but then said, "Never mind," because a blur of red had just ducked around the corner into Alicia's office.

"Lucy Crawford wants to sue the Congress Plaza Hotel because she was being anonymously harassed at work," Kalinda said, one hand propping her in the doorframe. "She thinks hotel management is behind the harassment because she's involved with the union and the service workers are about to strike. But the thing is, she's wrong. Somebody trashed her office, and it was about the strike, but it wasn't anyone from management."

"I know," Alicia said, sounding like she'd lost a case and it meant her dog was going to be put to sleep. "I talked to one of Hollahan's chefs, and a couple of the reservation clerks."

Kalinda stepped all the way into Alicia's office and closed the door.

She had her own office up on the fourth floor somewhere, a closet with a door next to the server room. If Kalinda went up there right now, she would find a half-inch of dust on the desktop keyboard. She always had her phone with her, the police scanner was in the car, and Alicia's office had a couch, anyway. Kalinda took a seat.

"I was already at the Congress Plaza talking to the clerk when Peter's press conference started," Alicia said, looking down at her hands. There was a chip in her manicure, and it was probably driving her crazy. "I had no idea. I saw it on a TV at the hotel bar. But the reporters were all still there, and Peter, he'd said that whole thing about the picket line."

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I tried to call you, but your phone was off."

Alicia was wearing her red blazer, the ugly Nancy Kerrigan one that zipped all the way up to her chin. She'd worn it a lot her first year at Lockhart/Gardner, when she was still trying to make her fundraiser luncheon wife wardrobe work a double-shift. She dressed better now, and the red blazer had been hanging on the door of her office in a plastic dry cleaner's bag for at least six months.

But if she came in wearing it today, that meant-- "So, you asked Will to bring you a change of clothes."

"I thought I could just stay there and slip out this morning before the press showed up."

"But you couldn't book a room in your own name."

Alicia didn't say anything, but the story of her whole stupid unrequited twenty years with Will was there in the way she cupped her elbow. Kalinda had heard this story before, and so she could prop her chin in her hands and say, "Shit, did you _finally_ do it?" but Alicia's face would fall like a box mix cake.

"Do you want me to fix this?"

"What do you mean?"

Kalinda stood up. "I can fix this," she said. "Give me five minutes."

 

BEFORE SHE WENT upstairs, Kalinda took off her jacket.

"Got a second?"

Will looked up from his desk, rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Yeah, absolutely, c'mon in," he said with phoned-in sincerity, telegraphing "no," "absolutely not" and "please go away" in the creases of his forehead.

Kalinda let the door swing shut. Will waved at the seat across the desk but she shook her head, walking over to stand by the glass, the spot where Will could see the bullpen and anyone in the bullpen could see who was in Will's office.

"About last night," she said.

When Kalinda interviewed at Stern, Lockhart & Gardner, Will had been the senior partner who gave her the once-over. She'd sat in this office, and he had said, "Everyone here is very good at what they do, but sometimes that means we don't see the forest through the trees. We need someone who doesn't miss that stuff." And Kalinda had said, yes, absolutely, that was her specialty. At the time, she'd meant she could trace the bank account that was messing up a divorce case, decipher the wiretap record that was turning a misdemeanor into a manslaughter charge.

"Listen," Will said, his voice pitched low, "I don't what you heard--"

"Shut up for a second. Look at me," she said, gesturing at herself, fingertips touching her collarbone. "See this blouse? I wore this blouse yesterday. And now I'm wearing it again today. So if I stand here, by the window, and we talk for a few minutes, your problem from last night goes away."

"Huh."

"Well, unless being dragged through the rumor mill with me really is a fate worse than death."

"Are you kidding? You're out of _my_ league."

Kalinda smirked. "Agreed."

She leaned against the glass, careful to keep her face in profile. Will rubbed the bridge of his nose again. Kalinda could ask Will about seeing the forest through the trees, and how that was supposed to work when it was her job to put out forest fires. But she didn't want to encourage his fondness for schlocky metaphors.

"What should we talk about?" Will said.

Kalinda shrugged. "I don't know."

"What's your favorite color?"

"I ... don't know?"

"Do you have pets?"

"Skip it."

"When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Without thinking, Kalinda said, "Somebody else." That answer had enough in common with the truth to be embarrassing, and so she looked over Will's shoulder and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

"When I was twelve years old," Will said, rocking in his chair, "the only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a forward for the Georgetown Hoyas, because I wanted to be just like Reggie Williams."

Kalinda relaxed then. Will only asked the question because he wanted to tell someone his own answer, and she was largely irrelevant in this transaction.

"So I, you know, I play CYO, and I go out for JV when I start high school. But I'm five-eleven, right? And it's sophomore year and I'm pretty much riding the bench. So I quit the basketball team, and instead, after school I joined, uh, the debate club." Will laughed at his own self-deprecating admission. "And so I go to Cornell, and then there I am at Georgetown, except I'm there to go to law school."

Kalinda wasn't sure she understood the narrative arc of this story. A guy gives up on a dream to run around in little shorts, gets an Ivy League education, makes tons of money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When Kalinda was twelve, she'd still been doing gymnastics. She'd torn her ACL right before junior nationals and spent a year rehabbing it but never got the same lift. She didn't ever think about it though, didn't even try to do handstands when she was drunk.

"I don't know," Will said. "I guess it feels like -- you have this idea of something you want, and you picture exactly how it's going to be. And if you get there some other way, it should still be good, right?"

Basically, the forest that Will couldn't see through the trees was his regret over never seeing Alicia naked before she gave birth to two children. Time for Kalinda to evacuate. "I think we're good here," she said.

 

PETER FLORRICK LOVED power more than he loved Alicia. Alicia loved the idea of Will more than she loved the reality of Peter. Will loved the idea of still being in love with Alicia after all these moldy years more than he loved Alicia, or even just the idea of her. So, love. Really, what was the point?

People wanted to believe that love was complicated, but it wasn't. Love was rarely complicated and almost never interesting. Kalinda would rather unravel what really mattered, like revenge.

"You led me to the Crawford criminal complaint," she said into the phone, before Carey could finish saying hello. She was in the car, driving out to University Village to see if some new client's construction company was really a money-laundering scheme. "You knew Hollahan was behind the harassment. Childs put a PD on the case when he was still going after the AFL-CIO endorsement. Once he lost out to Florrick, he wanted the union smeared, but it couldn't come from his office."

"Look, I know it looks like that's how it happened. That's not --" There was a moment of dead static on the phone line. "That's not what I meant to have happen."

"Sure," Kalinda said. She shifted the phone in its wedge between her ear and her shoulder.

"I'm serious! I'm a good guy. How hard is it for you to believe that I'm a good guy? Do I have some part-time job at a puppy mill? For Christ's sake, I was in the Peace Corps."

Right, except, Kalinda had seen Carey's Lockhart/Gardner personnel file. A year in Zimbabwe was the most time and the greatest distance he could hope to put between him and his LSAT score if he'd wanted any chance of getting into Harvard Law.

"You nailed Hollahan, didn't you?"

They did. They really, really did. But Carey would not be hearing Kalinda say that tonight.

"Going now," she said, and flipped the phone shut. She was about to toss the phone onto the passenger seat when it beeped in her hand. One new text message: _We have to talk about last night. Can I buy you dinner?_

Right. That happened. Just a little a mistake. Keeping one eye on the road, she started to tap out a reply: _Sure_. A little mistake, but a complicated one. Might be interesting. Still: _Maybe let's skip dinner. Also the talking._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to C & K for the beta, and to Archie Panjabi for rocking those boots.


End file.
